Thoughts on Recent Mashups

© The Melker Project

I love mashups--really, any kind of aural collage or remix--more than a reasonable person probably should. During my preteen years, I wasted hours on my Pioneer double cassette deck, mixing everything from Badfinger songs to The Hobbit on audio book into bastard combinations of Frank Zappa's Lumpy Gravy and YouTube Poop. To this day, there are mashups I prefer to any of their constituent parts: a 2005 version of LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House," mixed with Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much" and ingeniously titled "Janet Jackson is Playing at My House," has been stuck in my head for almost a decade now, despite the song itself having seemingly succumbed to the twin Internet plagues of time and DMCA notices. And yeah, I'm one of those assholes who gets legitimately excited whenever a new Girl Talk album is announced.

So it should probably come as no surprise that I instantly fell in love when I heard New York DJ Scott Melker's series of mashup EPs combining recent mainstream hip-hop hits with '70s-'90s pop. My younger sister, who I don't even think would be embarrassed to be publicly described as a Hall and Oates fan, introduced me to last year's Ballin' Oates, the collection that finally gave us the combination of the blue-eyed soul duo's "Rich Girl" and Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's" we never knew we needed. There's also the wonderfully-titled Trill Collins, which left me surprised and frankly dismayed by the amount of latent affection I have for the solo music of Phil Collins, and the even-more-wonderfully-titled Skeetwood Mac, which mixes 2 Chainz' "Yuck!" with the Rumours cut "The Chain"...'nuff said. Most recently at the time of this writing, Melker released Red Hot Trilli Peppers: my least favorite of the bunch, but only because the Chili Peppers have a less interesting body of work than any of the other artists; whatever your feelings on the original songs, pairing B.o.B.'s "Headband" with "Give It Away" is still an inspired move.